Category Archives: Politics

Did We Go With the Best, or the Most Convenient?

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Fukushima: Nuclear power’s VHS relic?

A brief history of nuclear power and the politics that goes along with it, in an attempt to determine whether we opted for designs we use because they were the best, i.e. did the US opt for light water reactors just because we had developed enrichment technology.

There is at least one omission, though.

The top US priority was to develop a reactor capable of powering submarines. A naval officer with a reputation for getting things done, Hyman Rickover, was appointed to lead the task.

Submarine reactors need to be small and compact, and avoid the use of materials such as hot sodium that could prove an explosive hazard.

The light water reactor, with the water under pressure to prevent it from boiling and turning to steam, was Rickover’s choice. It quickly entered service powering the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine.

The article fails to mention that the USS Sea Wolf (SSN-575), the second nuclear submarine in the US navy, had a sodium-cooled reactor. This kind of reactor has to have a secondary loop to make steam, and that means you run the risk of a primary-to-secondary leak. Sodium + water. As pointed out, and as any chemist or physicist who hangs out with those liberal alkali metals (way over on the left of the periodic table), or anyone who has seen a video knows, bad things™ can happen when you mix them. But the technology wasn’t simply ignored, which puts this account on a bit of shaky ground.

"Hi, I'm Randall, and I'm a MAN."

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If you have yet to run across posts on elevatorgate/rebeccapocalypse (over 9,000 Google hits on the former term) then you probably don’t read many science/skeptic blogs. If you have and are sick of it, don’t worry, because I’m not going to add my quanta of coinage. I have come to loathe participating in internet discussions of this ilk — despite the community supposedly being held among the science/skeptic minded, they have a tendency to stray from rationality and civility far too quickly and too much in magnitude for my taste. In many cases, if you don’t present the right answer™ as determined by the owner of the dais, you are quickly dogpiled into oblivion, and that can extend to any kind of criticism. Point out someone has misquoted Evil Protagonist (or note that EP was actually correct in some statement) and all of the sudden you are a staunch supporter of Evil Protagonist in the eyes of some (many?) participants.

However, in case you want more of the same or are otherwise interested in a somewhat related topic, here is a post by xkcd’s Randall Monroe on Google+’s insistence on publicly disclosing your gender, which does not seem to have descended into the usual quagmire, though it does include the predictable “it doesn’t bother me so it shouldn’t bother anybody” responses.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of reasons Google+ would want to ask about your gender. But there’s no good reason to pointedly make it the only thing in your profile that can’t be private—and many reasons not to, starting with basic courtesy. It may be a small issue in the grand scheme of things, but I think it’s worth getting right.

Paint It, White

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Cut waste, create jobs, save money — what’s not to like?

There is a link to several ideas to put people back to work, but the focus is on painting rooftops white to save utility costs, and idea that was popularized by Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

There’s a claim raised in the comments:

AC costs less than heating

Obviously the total amount you spend on heating and cooling will depend on the climate where you live, but what if we quantify this? A degree of heating vs a degree of cooling? Then it becomes easy to make a comparison to see how compelling rooftop painting might be — if you have comparable degree-days of each, then whichever is cheaper tells you which way to go.

The basic argument is a simple application of thermodynamics. All nonreversible thermodynamic processes (which include your heating and air conditioning) reject heat. In the case of heating, though, the goal is to produce the heat, which means you can build heaters which are basically 100% effective. Cooling, however, has to reject heat, and becomes less efficient as it becomes hotter outside. Cooling efficiency is necessarily less than 100%, which means cooling an arbitrary mass by a degree costs you more in energy than heating it does.

Then there is an economic analysis — are you using the same energy source for cooling and heating (say, gas heating vs electricity for cooling) and are those energy sources costing you the same, and how much heating and cooling do you do? If you live in a dry area you can use a swamp cooler, which is probably relatively cheap. But make no mistake — the energy to cool by a degree is greater than the energy to heat by a degree.

Copy … Riiiight

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I’ve read a few articles and blog posts in the past couple of days about a measure in the senate that would modify copyright laws. Senate Bill 978 is a turd — vague and overbearing (a felony? For ten downloads?), that attempts to criminalize unauthorized performances, rather than have them simply be covered under the civil part of copyright law, and it arguably affects embedding videos, even if you weren’t the one who uploaded them. So it’s bad.

But something that also bothers me is are some of the arguments used in the debate — embedding videos is being discussed as a “free speech” issue, and I don’t think this has anything to do with free speech rights. One of the pieces was on Starts With a Bang, a blog I read regularly, and got several links and tweets.

First, here’s a primer I ran across recently: Understanding Copyright And Licenses.*

Ethan (and others offer a similar sentiment) offers this view:

Don’t let them bully you out of your right to say what you want to say, and to say it how you want to say it.

The argument that copyright takes away your right to say what you want is a bunch of bull. If you are using a copyrighted piece of work, they aren’t your words, so any kind of protections for the originator of those words doesn’t stop you from saying what you want to or the way that you want to. An upload of someone else’s performance isn’t your expression. This is an issue of fair use and what constitutes infringement, not of free speech. The creator of an artistic/literary work has certain rights. It doesn’t matter if they might benefit from the exposure you might give them by uploading a video of their work — if you don’t have permission to do so, you aren’t allowed to do it!

I’ve had people use cartoons I’ve drawn without permission. Sometimes they strip the attribution from the work. I’ve even seen one instance, at an Institution that teaches Technology in Massachusetts, where they claimed it was “by permission” but they never asked. Those are the people who should have to pay a (small) price. It’s not worth it to me to pursue these people in court; I’m not bothered to the point of action (I rarely turn anyone down who asks), and since the cartoons in question are not registered with the copyright office I would have to show lost income, which would be basically zilch. (Were they registered there would be statutory damages I could try and recover, as well as legal fees). But that doesn’t make them right, or turn my cartoons into their speech. The bottom line is that these are my works, and I get to decide who uses them, in situations not covered by fair use.

But this bill ignores things. If someone uploads something to youtube for which they did not have the right or permission to do so, they are the ones who should be held accountable; if they lie about owning the copyright, there should be some appropriate punishment. Embedding a video, on the other hand, for which permission has been granted, should not be a crime should it turn out that the one who uploaded it disregarded or lied about owning the copyright. That’s one of my main beefs about this bill. But one has to use a little common sense. It bothers me when I see someone say that you should watch the video right away, because it will be taken down soon. You suspect (or know) that it’s a violation, but you link to it anyway?

So yes, fight this bill. But fight it for the right reason, and not some misguided free-speech notion that what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is yours. ‘Tain’t so.
——
*pay attention to the section at the end. If you use online services like Twitter, Flickr and others, chances are you sign away all of your rights to your uploads as part of the service agreement.

Grad School Gloom and Doom, Part Whatever in a Neverending Series

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Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.
At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts.

I’m guessing that if you framed the statistics as doctors who end up working in hospitals you might have a dire employment rate to cite. A fake statistic, but a dramatic one to prove a point. And that’s the problem with most of these “graduate school is broken” articles — the idea that the only career for which you’d go to graduate school is to become a professor. If you aren’t smart enough to realize that a professor churning out more than a few students over the course of his/her career is unsustainable as a closed system, you probably shouldn’t go to grad school. But that’s based on intelligence, not the job market.

That’s not to say that the graduate education system isn’t broken, or at least exploitative, so don’t take away the message that I disagree with the whole article. But let’s be honest in terms of the state of affairs, employment prospects and the goals of graduate school. I think it weakens the argument when you distort the facts. So present some of the real problems, and acknowledge that we’re being misled at some level about what the role of grad school and research is: You can’t simultaneously have a shortage and a glut of scientifically qualified people, and you can’t simultaneously demand (as the article rightly points out) that academia do a lot of research and also not have a lot of grad students around — especially if being a professor requires you spend more time filling out grant applications than doing research. Someone is deceiving us about what’s going on.

Case in point regarding the employment prospects: In FY2009, more than 27,000 H-1B visas were granted to people holding doctorates (pdf alert; a summary exists, too) along with 85,000 Master’s degrees, out of a total of about 214,000 visas. This covers a wider spectrum of occupations than STEM subjects, and unfortunately there is no breakdown of education level correlated to occupation, but if the rough proportion holds then of the tens of thousands of STEM jobs on these visas, about half went to people with graduate degrees of some sort. That’s hard to reconcile with the notion that we have too many graduate students for the economy to absorb. One obvious possible answer is that the system is being abused and we’re importing cheap labor, and I think that’s going on; it’s simply a matter of determining the extent to which it is going on.

But the other issues raised in the article need to be investigated, as well as the solutions. It’s true that the large industrial labs have either evaporated or at least shed their role of basic research, and the government hasn’t stepped in to fill that void. The author also takes on issues of college-level education, which also need solving.

Fun With Dick and Jane's Bar-Graph Software

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Even More Fun With Charts: Making the Poor Look Rich

Lies, damned lies and statistics brought to life in the tale of three bar graphs.

From one of the included links

[I]f you add up all the lines of income over $200,000, you get around $2 trillion. (I may be off, because I’m eyeballing it, but I’m not off by much.) That obviously far exceeds the nearly $1.4 trillion accruing to the $100-200,000 set. And it undermines rather than bolsters (though does not disprove) Reihan’s argument that “the collective political influence of the upper-middle-class is greater than that of the ultra-rich.”

And it’s true that the collective influence of the middle class is greater than that of the rich. If our foundational principles included “one economic class, one vote,” there might be a point to the WSJ graph. But since it’s one person, one vote, you have to normalize the income by the number of people.

Meet Me in Small Claims Court

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We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems and crime’s adjudication as Justice must be seen to be done.

When I read that in Statement From the Family of Osama bin Laden, my irony meter broke. They owe me a new one.

I was out of town on May 1 (and all of last week), and have had only intermittent chances to catch up on all of the happenings, but do have some thoughts. There are only a few things that bother me at all, I think. The kind of celebration I saw Monday night/Tuesday morning made me a tad uncomfortable; I understand it, but the first thing I thought of was the media coverage of the reaction in some (not all) places in the middle east after 9/11. It wasn’t obvious that they were celebrating justice or reveling in revenge. That gives me pause. Labeling it as justice also has some issues. I don’t know what a better description would be, but the word implies that this was somehow tied in with the criminal justice system, with due process and rights. It wasn’t. This was a military action, and it was justified.

Terrorism is a strange mix of criminal activity and war. But one must not forget that it is still war in many of its actions. Bin Laden declared war on the US in 1998 and carried out overt acts, killing thousands, and not just in the US. The attribution of these deeds solely as criminal acts is, I think, naive and simplistic. This did not take place on US soil. The notion that the appropriate response to locating him, in foreign territory, would to be to serve an arrest warrant is ludicrous. Good men put their lives at risk in this operation, and would have been at greater risk if they had been under a restriction to capture but not kill, or with similar rules of engagement. Keep in mind that we had other options, like sending a missile or a GPS/laser-guided bomb. An enemy general in a war does not need to have a pistol in his hand at the time of action in order to justify bombing his headquarters. This, I think, is no different. This was a war of bin Laden’s choosing, and it is likely that the only way the ending could have been different would be if he had surrendered of his own accord. Which he had the option to do at pretty much any point.

Fred Clark at slacktivist has some excellent posts (its predecessor is linked within) on the reasoning behind the justification. There is a mention of the Nuremburg trials after WWII in a post by Glenn Greenwald, which I have not read. Those trials took place after the war was over, with prisoners who had been captured, many of whom were captured after hostilities had ceased. That’s an important distinction, I think. Prisoners are taken when they have made an overt act of surrender. Absent that, they are considered combatants, and don’t have to explicitly “go” for a weapon to be considered dangerous. I would not consider the risk trading even one more life for Osama bin Laden’s capture to have been acceptable. His killing was not arbitrary, nor was it the execution of a criminal sentence. It was part of the war that he declared, and unlike the slaughter of civilians he orchestrated, was justified.

I Don't Care What You Did Last Summer

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What your teachers are doing

All of your public school teachers have a history. Almost all of them have masturbated. Many of them have smoked marijuana. Almost all of them have dated; most of them have danced. Some of them are gay. Some of them are heterosexual. Almost all of them have private kinks which you don’t know about, because they don’t practice them in public, let alone when they’re doing their jobs. Some of them have been sex workers.

And you know what? All of them can be fired or blacklisted by local prudes on school boards or the school administration. Teachers: you don’t get to be human. This outrages me.

Predictions Are Easy for Predictable Systems

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A scant four months ago I made a prediction of what would happen if gas prices rose significantly.

[T]he same people who cried “Socialism!” every time the Obama administration tried something (other than tax cuts for high-income people) to jump-start the economy will wail for government intervention to lower the price of gas.
…
They will do this without recognizing any irony.

I just read this, originating from the speaker.gov blog, so it’s Boehner’s position — Running on Empty: Obama Administration Does Nothing to Address Skyrocketing Gas Prices

I hereby claim success. It didn’t even take until $4 a gallon.

It’s also funny how they claim that Obama’s policies are the cause and in the same breath observe that this oil-price spike happened in 2008 for the same reasons as the current spike. That would seem to violate causality.